Movies Pick: Digital Wizardry

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who revolutionized the playing of Bach with his recording of the Goldberg Variations at the age of twenty-three, lived a strange and troubled life and died, at fifty, in 1982—nearly two decades after his last public concert. Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s documentary “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould” relies on a wide range of interviews to illuminate unfamiliar corners of the musician’s life and historical clips to reveal fascinating glimpses of his artistry. The film also sheds light on Gould’s darker mysteries. David Denby calls it “the most comprehensive and touching film portrait of the great Canadian pianist in all his glories and miseries,” and adds that “Gould was simultaneously witty, erudite, very shrewd about his place in the music world, and slightly mad, and the movie makes it clear that his physical needs—some real, some imagined, and each requiring a separate doctor and brace of pills—finally overcame his sanity and led to his early death.”

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